Remember Clarissa Explains it All? Or The Adventures of Pete and Pete? What if those shows featured a convincingly greasy teenage gay boy on a Tolkien quest for gay porn?

That’s pretty much the plot for “Jackpot,” an award-winning short by Adam Baran that sees 14-year-old Jack chasing after a stash of Honcho and Inches in 1990s suburbia. But can Jack’s imaginary porn-star fairy godfather, Ricky Swayze, help him get his prize before bullies beat the crap out of him?

Or is running the wrong answer? “Stop being a pussysaurus,” Swayze advises his young charge. “Getting beaten up doesn’t mean you don’t win.”

Baran tells the Huffington Post that “Jackpot”, winner of Best Short Film at the 2013 Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, hit close to home for him—and not just in its themes: “The film was shot in my hometown, in my bedroom, and in a parking lot where I was bullied myself,” he recalls. “The message that [Jack] learns is the message I wish I could go back and tell myself at that age: Sometimes it’s better to stay and fight, even if you don’t win.”

Baran, who worked on the hit web series Hunting Season, says “Jackpot” is also about how pornography can help gay men figure out who they are.”Even if sometimes it leads them to form the wrong impressions about what sex is actually going to be like,” he adds.